Ladies and gentlemen, meet Belvin Perry, a judge of some kind in
the city of Orlando, county of Orange, state of utter and complete
lunacy. Belvin not only thinks he knows more about the law than the
average individualwhich is almost certainly not true these daysbut
the Founding Fathers, who wrote the law in the first place, as
well.

To all appearances, that's why he cited two fellows named Mark
Schmidter and Julian Heiklen for contempt of court when they refused
to bow to his illegal decree not to exercise their First Amendment
rights on the public plaza outside the petty dictatorship he calls a
courtroom.

Heiklen got 155 daysmore than five monthsfor distributing
literature about jury nullification to passersby, and Schmidter is
expected to get about the same. What is not expected is anything
resembling due process. Under these circumstances there is no jury,
just a nasty piece of work on the bench who apparently hates the idea
of a free people governing themselves.

You can see this pompous self-important little manthe kind who
can strut sitting downon the video linked to below. Unfortunately,
he is typical of the rot that presently infects the courts of what was
once the freest country in the world. If there's no kangaroo in his
family crest, there should be.

Not surprisingly, Orlando is rated as the third most dangerous
city in the United States. And why shouldn't it be, when the judges,
bailiffs, and jailerspresumed dispensers of law and orderare
busy illegally prosecuting individuals for publicly expressing their
opinion?

I know that as a short, bald, fat guy with a really stupid name,
Belvin has a lot to compensate for. His life was probably hell in
grade school. But why, I ask, take it out on the honest and lawful
proponents of a legal concept that was ancient when this country was
born, and highly thought of by both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas
Jefferson?

Then there are the fly-by-night institutions: the Arizona Supreme
Court, for one, the Constitution of the State of Maryland, the 4th
US Circuit Court of Appeals, Scheflin and Van Dyke, the Indiana State
Constitution, the Yale Law Journal, and the United States Supreme
Court.

I'd love to give my readers this clown's publicly-available phone
number and office address. Perhaps they could help explain to him why
he's being considered for our coveted White Wig Award for judicial
behavior consistent with that of the English judges whose insane,
evil, and mentally incompetent rulings helped to spark the American
Revolution. But the last time we did something like that, the United
States Marshals Service, no less, another completely unlawful operation on
the part of a runaway super-state (see Article I, Section VIII of the
United States Constitution and show me where it authorizes a federal
secret police force), threatened to shut The Libertarian Enterprise
down.

Instead, please allow me to introduce you to "A Juror's Creed",
something I put together about a decade ago, and ask you to spread it
around, as widely as you possibly can. The more of us who are aware of
a jury's ancient prerogatives, the less hold tyranny has on any one of
us.

"As an American juror, I promise to exercise my 1000-year-old
right and duty to arrive at a verdict, not merely on the basis of the
facts of a particular case, or any instructions that I may be given,
but through my ability to reason, my knowledge of the Bill of Rights,
and my individual conscience; when needful, I will judge the law
itself."

The law, in effect, is what a jury says it isa very American
idea. Juries didn't much like alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s and
they refused to convict about 60 percent of those accused of breaking
the law, until the government, in order to save face, was forced to
repeal what had been an idiotic law. That's why the government, since
September 11, 2001, has been careful to evade due process wherever it
can, with its renditions and Guantanamo, and every other totalitarian
tactic they can think of. As with any two-penny tinpot tyranny, due
process gets in the way of kidnapping and torturing their perceived
enemies.

The sad, stupid case of the pudgy judge in Orlandothis tubby
little strutteris only a single example in a long, long line of
poor, deluded creatures, reaching back into the Stone Age, who have
believed they can run your life better than you can, and are willing
to kill you and cook you and eat you just to prove it. That attitude
is a disease which I hope and trust the next few years will finally
cure.